Why It's Great to Be a Girl: 50 Awesome Reasons Why We Rule!

By Jacqueline Shannon and Madeline Trobaugh

Why It's Great to Be a Girl is a must-have for every girl from six to sixteen! Chock-full of fascinating facts, enlightening girl-knowledge, and important historical milestones—even a list of great books written by women—here is a guaranteed self-esteem booster for young females everywhere . . . and it's lots of fun too! After all, what girl wouldn't feel great about herself knowing that:

• girls hear better than boys
• girls drive better than boys
• girls' bodies are stronger than boys' in every way, except for muscles
• girls are less susceptible to major diseases
• and, according to many anthropologists and archaeologists, girls actually "civilized" humankind!

So get ready for an eye-opening journey through the awesomeness of girldom—with the ultimate guide to why being a girl is the ultimate in cool!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 13, 2009
• ISBN: 9780061877476

Jacqueline Shannon

Jacqueline Shannon is a San Diego–based journalist and author who has written both for children and about children, for teens and about teens. She has published eight young adult novels and has written frequently for Seventeen, Teen, YM, and Cosmopolitan. She is the author of The New Mother's Body Book, Dream Doll, and Raising a Star.

Book preview

Introduction

In the summer of 2005, my then sixteen-year-old daughter Madeline and I squealed with delight (and startled a few of our fellow theater-goers) when a girl in the sleeper-hit documentary Mad Hot Ballroom plugged my 1994 book Why It’s Great to Be a Girl.

In the documentary, several groups of eleven-year-olds in mostly inner-city schools face the highs, the heartbreaks, and sometimes the humiliation of competitive ballroom dancing. In a few scenes, some of the girls are complaining about the attitudes, behaviors, and the givens of their male partners. Why, bristled one, do THEY always get to lead? At one point, silence. Then Emma, who the film’s Web site (www.paramountclassics.com/madhot) describes as a typical New York kid [who] always has something meaningful to say and who stands out as the girl who is wise beyond her years, suddenly blurts out, "Look, I read this book called Why It’s Great to Be a Girl, and I learned that…"

My daughter and I were so excited that we barely heard her exact words. I just knew that they were extremely positive. And we both came away with the opinion that the book, in at least some small way, contributed to Emma’s confidence and her ability to speak up when it’s important.

The first edition of Why It’s Great to Be a Girl has been out of print for years, but, in retrospect, I shouldn’t have been as surprised at Emma’s comment as I was. Through the years, friends of friends, friends of cousins, and coworkers have found used copies of Why It’s Great to Be a Girl to give as gifts and have asked me to autograph them, although I warned them, A lot of the facts in that book are very outdated.

Our world has changed dramatically since 1992–1993, when I was researching and writing the book. Madeline was four. She graduated from high school with a 4.3 GPA, she plays a mean clarinet (she was in both marching band and wind symphony), and she was frequently called upon during her high school years to boost morale, not just in the band but also among non-band students. As her senior project, she started a business designing and manufacturing T-shirts that don’t bash males but that empower teen girls. Madeline won the 2005–2006 Helix High School English Department Outstanding Student of the Year honor. She was awarded a substantial merit scholarship to one of California’s best private colleges, where she is now a freshman.

I am not saying that she’s perfect. One example: her room has always been a pigsty. And I don’t mean to imply that her successes and self-confidence are solely due to my book or the parenting she received. She has had several excellent role models over the years, many of them teachers (both women and men), who have boosted her confidence in her abilities. She is also an insatiable reader of certain genres of fiction from which she has derived strong convictions of her own.

This book is a longer (women have achieved a lot since the early 1990s!) and very revised and updated version of the original. That book was one of the first books written about self-esteem for girls. I got the idea for the book because my own daughter, a preschooler, was encountering sexism even at that early age. Here is just one of the examples that I listed in the introduction to the original version of the book:

An elderly man walking his dog through a park stops to talk to a little girl [that would be Madeline] who is climbing the monkey bars. When I grow up, I’m going to be a ballerina and a doctor, she tells the man.

You let the boys be the doctors, the man replies. Girls don’t have the stomach to deal with blood.

Tee-hee. Madeline is now working toward a bachelor of science degree in nursing and plans to go on to get a master’s degree in midwifery. I wanted to counteract those doses of boy bias by building up Madeline’s pride in her own gender while not bashing guys.

The other thing that spurred me on at the time were the results of some very discouraging studies. For example, a 1991 American Association of University Women (AAUW) study found that only 29 percent of young teenage girls were happy the way I am, compared to the 60 percent who gave that response back in elementary school and in marked contrast to their teenage boy counterparts, whose self-images had been judged much more positive.

Carol Gilligan, who was then head of Harvard’s Project on the Psychology of Women and the Development of Girls, had found that one of the ways teenage girls exhibit their wavering confidence is by becoming more tentative in offering opinions—a trait that she said often persists into adulthood. A Gilligan example at the time: When she interviewed one girl at age twelve, the girl answered I don’t know only 21 times; at the age of fourteen, the same girl’s I don’t know number shot up to 135.

I realized that those studies mirrored my own experience twenty-something years earlier. I had been something of a childhood star—the whiz kid who skipped grades in elementary school, edited the school paper, was always voted the class president or team captain. But something happened to me along about the time I turned fourteen. Although I can’t remember any specific incidents that triggered it (it was probably largely due to my rapidly changing body), I completely lost my self-confidence and basically skulked my way through high school and then college too. I did not really get my old self-confidence back till I was past thirty. The original Why It’s Great to Be a Girl was my part in helping to ensure that that didn’t happen to later generations of girls.

I would say overall that in the years since the original version was published, self-esteem among white and African American girls has improved (recent studies, in fact, have shown that African American girls have higher self-esteem than any other race). But it’s still not as high as it should be, especially among minorities other than African Americans. Over the years, Madeline attended well-integrated public schools in Southern California and made friends with a variety of girls who weren’t white. When they all became teens, my daughter, dismayed, began to tell me that many of her friends were encountering bias from their families because their cultures historically value males more than females.

It is not my intention to interfere with or try to change other cultures. I simply feel that girls like these will get a boost from Why It’s Great to Be a Girl. I also hope to reach an international audience of girls who live in countries in which gender bias is even more prevalent than in the Western countries. For these reasons, this new version is more multicultural (to reflect the increasing multiculturalism in Western countries) and global (the original version pretty much focused on women’s accomplishments in the Western countries, especially the United States). It is also the reason that, while the original book was primarily intended for mothers of young daughters and, to a much-less-stressed extent, to girls entering adolescence, this edition was written for YOU as well—a girl or young woman who can read on her own.

So check out how much you’ve got going for yourself. I promise you, by the time you finish this book, you’ll be in awe of what your gender has achieved, full of pride about the special talents and strengths of your female body and mind, and fully convinced, once and forever, that it really is great to be a girl.

—Jacqueline Shannon

San Diego, California

1

The most frequently sung song of all time was written by women.

Mildred Hill and Patty Smith Hill wrote the music that was to become Happy Birthday to You in 1893. It became the first song ever sung in space (at least by earthlings!) on March 8, 1969, when the astronauts aboard Apollo 9 sang it for Christopher Kraft, director of space operations for NASA. Contrary to popular belief, Happy Birthday is not in the public domain. Hill set up a foundation to which a royalty is supposed to be paid for each entertainment use of the song—when it’s sung on a sitcom, for example. Or at your birthday party!

Actually, it’s the most frequently sung song in the English language, according to the Guinness Book of World Records. It’s been translated into many other languages, but, oddly, it is often sung with the English lyrics in countries where English is not a primary language.

Incidentally, a woman, Euphemia Allen, also composed what is probably the song played most often on the piano—Chopsticks!

Speaking of musical achievement…

2

We sing better than guys do.

Six times as many females as males can sing in tune. Why? No expert claims to have the definitive answer. But most speculate that better singing is a part of the female’s superior verbal-ability package (see #5). Others point to the fact that females have superior auditory memory (see #25)—that is, we are better at remembering the way a song is supposed to sound, say, from hearing it on the radio. It probably also doesn’t hurt that mothers tend to sing more to girl babies than to boy babies, according to some studies.

3

Women invented many of the devices that make our everyday lives easier.

In 1957 C. D. Tuska, the patent director for RCA, a company that makes TVs, audiovisual equipment, and